Psychological Counseling Recruitment

Currently, there is no unified standard answer for recruitment in the entire psychology industry. The essence is a two-way match between the recruiter’s scenario needs and cost tolerance, and the job seeker’s professional abilities and career demands. Any talk of “correct recruitment standards” that is divorced from specific scenarios is just a hoax.

I just helped my friend to screen 37 consultant resumes for the community psychological service center in the old town last week, and the pitfalls I stepped into can be read into half an industry pitfall avoidance guide. There is a candidate who has received a registration system supervisor certificate, with more than 5,000 casework hours and a shining resume. The basic salary he asked for is 20,000. However, our community center mainly serves the elderly living alone and left-behind children in the jurisdiction. Most of the cases are free or only charge a cost price of 50 yuan. After deducting the labor costs of the venue and social workers, we cannot support this salary at all, so we can only regretfully decline. There is also a fresh graduate who has just obtained the third-level psychological counselor certificate. She said that she can get no basic salary and only get commission for each case. However, the center has to provide her with at least three months of pre-job training and practice with the public welfare hotline. The supervision cost and manpower investment during this period are not small expenses, and in the end it is stuck on the cost line.

If the recruitment logic of universities or public mental health centers were changed, then the registered supervisor who just wanted a basic salary of 20,000 yuan might still have to fight for it. I had dinner with the director of a psychology center in a 985 university before. He said that last year he recruited a master of clinical psychology who was one of the top 2 in the country. His training background was impeccable, but he had too little practical experience. When accepting new students, he did not identify the suicide risk of severely depressed patients. Later, something happened to a student, and the entire center was interviewed three times by the superior department, and it is still being rectified. Therefore, their recruitment standards are very strict now. They must be registered system members, have more than 3,000 hours of case experience, and receive systematic crisis intervention training. They would rather hire mature consultants with an annual salary of 300,000 yuan than take risks to recruit new people. This is the consensus of the academics - the professional error tolerance rate is too low, and if the reputation is broken, it will never be restored.

But if you ask the HR of a chain consulting platform that handles C-side traffic on the market, they might think that neither of these two candidates is the best solution. I had previously contacted the recruitment director of a leading platform, and he showed me internal data: the retention rate of consultants on their platform is only 23% correlated with professional qualifications, but is correlated with the "visitor repurchase rate" by more than 70%. Therefore, when they recruit people, in addition to meeting the basic qualification standards, they also pay more attention to whether the consultant can make stable return visits with visitors, whether they can take on long-term cases, and whether they can write popular science content to increase their followers. They will even give priority to candidates with experience in education and sales industries. This view is highly controversial in the industry. Many academic practitioners criticized them for turning psychological counseling into a service industry for recharging and applying for cards, which has lost their ethical bottom line. However, their user repurchase rate last year was indeed 18 percentage points higher than the industry average. Commercialization is feasible, and they naturally have their survival logic.

From the perspective of a consultant looking for a job, the current recruitment market is indeed a bit confusing. A little girl who studied clinical psychology for 4 years complained to me before. She interviewed three institutions, and two of them asked her to work as a "psychological consultant" for three months. To put it bluntly, she just called to attract clients. If she couldn't get 10 payment orders, she wouldn't be transferred to a consultant position. She felt that the "Abnormal Psychology" and "Introduction to Psychotherapy" she had studied for several years were all in vain, and she almost changed careers directly. There are also many mature consultants who have been working for five or six years. They do not want to accept commissions from agencies and do not have their own channels for acquiring clients. When looking for a job, they are stuck on the question of "should I help the agency with operations?" and are in a dilemma.

In the past few years, I have helped different types of organizations set up recruitment systems. To be honest, there is really no one-size-fits-all standard. Those who provide community welfare psychological services do not need to have a high training background. They only need to have sufficient affinity and basic crisis intervention training. The salary is subsidized based on the length of service, but the retention rate is very high. ； If you run a clinically oriented private clinic, you will definitely need to have professional qualifications. Even if you can't recruit people in the early stage and wait, you can't just make up the numbers. If there is an ethical problem, the entire clinic's sign will be destroyed. ； If you provide enterprise EAP services, the consultant must understand some workplace rules, otherwise you will not be able to have a conversation when connecting with the enterprise, and it will be useless no matter how professional you are.

A few days ago, I had a coffee with several industry veterans and talked about this matter. Everyone was very calm. Now the entire industry is still trying to cross the river by feeling its stones. It is normal for recruitment standards to be messy. When all subsequent ethical standards and professional qualification requirements are implemented, there will naturally be clearer standards. Now, whether you are recruiting people or looking for a job, don’t be obsessed with finding a “perfect match”. If you try a few times, you can always find someone who is on the same page.